Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

“Where Have All the Flowers Gone?” is a modern folk-style song. Inspired lyrically by the traditional Cossack folk song “Koloda-Duda”, Pete Seeger borrowed an Irish melody[ and the first three verses in 1955 and published it in Sing Out! magazine. Additional verses were added in May 1960 by Joe Hickerson, who turned it into a circular song. Its rhetorical “where?” and meditation on death place the song in the ubi sunt tradition. In 2010, the New Statesman listed it as one of the “Top 20 Political Songs”. The 1964 release of the song as a Columbia Records Hall of Fame series 45 single, 13-33088, by Pete Seeger was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 2002 in the Folk category. Seeger found inspiration for the song in October 1955 while he was on a plane bound for a concert at Oberlin College, one of the few venues which would hire him during the McCarthy era. Leafing through his notebook he saw the passage, “Where are the flowers, the girls have plucked them. Where are the girls, they’ve all taken husbands. Where are the men, they’re all in the army.” These lines were taken from the traditional Cossack folk song “Koloda-Duda”, referenced in the Mikhail Sholokhov novel And Quiet Flows the Don (1934), which Seeger had read “at least a year or two before”. In a 2013 interview, Seeger explained that he borrowed the melody from an Irish lumberjack song with the words ‘Johnson says he’ll load more hay.’ He simply slowed the tune and incorporated the lines into it. Seeger created a song which was subsequently published in Sing Out in 1962. He recorded a version with three verses on The Rainbow Quest album. Later, Joe Hickerson added two more verses with a recapitulation of the first in May 1960 in Bloomington, Indiana. In 2010, the New Statesman listed it as one of the “Top 20 Political Songs”. The song appeared on the compilation album Pete Seeger’s Greatest Hits (1967) released by Columbia Records. Pete Seeger’s recording from the Columbia album The Bitter and the Sweet (November 1962).